1. Field of Invention
The invention relates generally to measuring and improving business performance, and more specifically to apparatuses and methods used to measure and improve contact center agent performance.
2. Art Background
Businesses interact with a plethora of customers on a daily basis across the world, in order to conduct commerce in the modern age. A given business experiences its own universe of customer interactions or transactions (“interactions” and “transactions” are used synonymously herein), which are necessary to maintaining a healthy and thriving state of business-customer relationships; such a state of business-customer relationships is necessary and vital to ensure the success of the business.
In order to interface with the customers, businesses have adopted the contact center model to provide personal service to the customers via teams of agents that engage in interactions with customers. Customers commonly use the telephone and email as a means of contacting a business, such a center staffed with agents to field calls from customers is commonly called a call center.
Call centers can vary in size from small units containing several agents to large units containing teams of agents numbering into the hundreds or even thousands. Often the call centers are large and require significant resources to staff, manage, and train the agents that comprise the call center. Call centers are managed by one or more managers whose jobs include both solving the complex customer problem, which presents questions beyond the authority of the agent to resolve, to supervising the agent's interaction with the customers so that the quality of service provided to the customers can be monitored and hopefully improved.
Assessing the quality of service provided to the customers by the call center agents has grown increasingly more difficult as call centers have increased in size. An agent handles many calls and/or emails a day; however, only a small fraction of the calls and/or emails fielded by an agent are ever monitored by a call center supervisor. Typically, call center agent performance is measured only once a week, at an agent level. This low frequency rate of monitoring does not provide an adequate measure of the agent's performance and the quality of service provided to the customer. U.S. Pat. No. 5,535,256 to Maloney et al. provides a tool to the call center supervisor that is aimed at automating the monitoring process within the constraints of a call center supervisor's ability to address the variety of tasks that the supervisor is assigned to do. However, the call center supervisor cannot sample the agent's calls frequently enough and provide the necessary feedback to the agent that is required to increase the quality of service provided to the customers. Neither can the call center supervisor increase the sales rate of the agents or the overall return on investment with respect to the call center.
What is needed are affordable processes and systems for business contact centers that are scalable to any size business which can also improve the performance of the contact center agents, their business processes, and their customer interactions.